Hotels

The Fountain City House hotel, currently the site of the Weathervane Terrace Inn & Suites. In the mid 1860s Amos Fox & Hiram Rose built a boarding house on River Street (Pine River Lane) for the men they hired to build their Lake Michigan dock a block away. Richard Cooper from Little Traverse (Harbor Springs) managed it. He bought the building in 1867 and named it the Fountain City House after the steamer whose passengers gave him so much of his business. By 1873 our first hotel had grown into the largest hotel in northern lower Michigan.

The Fountain City House was often the first stop for the region’s settlers. Newspaperman Willard Smith lived there after he arrived in 1869 to get the Sentinel up and running next door. He remembered that “ . . . in the center (of the hotel office) was a large box stove. On the winter evenings as we played euchre and sometimes ‘penny ante,’ a line of socks surrounded the big stove from which arose a perfume that today would drive every guest from the house. We had but one ‘Resorter’ and he was a delirium tremens subject from Chicago.” The hotel closed in 1953.

The Charlevoix Resort Association, later the Belvedere Club, was established in 1878. A year later the founders built this 16-room club/boarding house where members could lodge while they supervised the construction of their cottages. It also housed overflow guests. The structure became a de facto hotel, at least for the resort. An attached dining/meeting hall was later added on the other side as demand increased. The original building burned in 1886; the addition was only singed.

By the next summer the “New Belvedere Hotel” stood in its place, this one open to the public. The arrival of the railroad in 1892 called for two expansions from the New Belvedere’s forty rooms.

It reached its full size of eighty-seven rooms in 1902. The 1892 modernization included two bathrooms, utilized by appointment only. Otherwise, bathing was suggested in the usually chilly waters of Pine Lake across the railroad tracks. The solarium seen here was added in the early 1920s. Visitors to the Belvedere have included Eliot Ness, the “Untouchable” who put away Al Capone in the 1930s, Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs, Barry Goldwater, Adlai Stevenson, author Booth Tarkington, auto magnate Ransom E. Olds, popular 1930s film actress Constance Bennett, and other notable names.

For all its vaunted reputation, the Belvedere Hotel was plain, almost dowdy on the interior. It began to age seriously during the Depression and the 1940s. After World War II the hotel did not regain the business it once enjoyed due to changing travel patterns. Old resort hotels fell out of popularity in a time of mass and cheap travel. All during the 1950s the resort association debated what to do. By 1960 it was estimated that $100,000 was needed to upgrade the building for an uncertain future, so a decision was made to tear it down later that year.

The Noble started as the Ingleside in 1878, and changed names before a major fire in the mid 1890s. Traveling salesmen came to prefer it to the Fountain City House because it was in the middle of downtown at the Clinton Street corner. They wouldn’t have to wait for the bridge to close. F. W. Chapel bought the damaged building in 1897 for a drugstore below with offices and rooms to let above. Chapel sold to B. A. Herman who called it the Central Drug Store. He sold to Harley Ochs whose descendants have maintained the business to this day. The building was replaced by a low brick structure in 1958.

Five years after the railroad arrived in June, 1892 the Chicago & West Michigan Railway made plans for a grand hotel to serve its passengers. Well into construction in October of 1897, a rushed job ended in tragedy. Stabilization and plastering of the lower floors was not completed when more lumber was installed and plastering commenced on the upper levels, adding tremendous weight. A sixty-mile-an-hour wind roared out of the northwest, causing the top-heavy north end to collapse into the central portion, which pulled the south end over. Two men were thrown from the roof and killed.

The rebuilt Inn, the pride of Charlevoix, opened in time for the 1898 season. The 250-room four-story hotel was over 500 feet long, and at full capacity could sleep 800 guests. Its porches stretched 1300 lineal feet, almost a quarter of a mile. The Inn was second in size in Michigan only to the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. It even had a finely appointed indoor heated pool down on the Pine Lake shore, open also to townspeople for a nominal fee. A postcard written in 1908 stated: “ . . . stopping here a while, it is the grandest place you most ever saw.”

The Inn catered to railroad passengers who disembarked three times a day at the height of the season, arranged for baggage delivery, then walked up the grand staircase behind the station, across the terrace past a tall rustic stone fountain, and up more stairs into the hotel where they could spend their entire vacation and, if they chose, never see the town.

The main lobby was filled with custom-made chairs, no two of which were alike. In the far background, the dining room that filled the entire north end of the main floor could accommodate five hundred. But all this opulence and grandeur did not last. Increasing reliance on the automobile cut into railroad business. One of The Inn’s drawbacks was that, reliant as it was on the railroad, it provided too little space for parking and had no room to expand. The Depression only hastened the end. Its contents were auctioned off in late 1941, and the wonder of the age came down.

The third of the town’s grand hotels began life in 1899 when a small hotel went up at the end of West Dixon Avenue, the only hotel constructed in Charlevoix to take advantage of the Lake Michigan panorama. The Beach Hotel had only fifteen rooms sharing one bathroom; its office was nothing more than a desk in a corner of the dining room. But Martha Elston Baker, wife of the builder, had gained experience at her father’s hotel, The Elston, downtown. She was a born hotelier and terrific manager.

Martha Baker was so successful that five years after opening she doubled the Beach’s capacity.

Eleven years after that, a Chicago architect drew plans that, over the winter of 1914-1915, extended the Beach west and took it down seven stories to the water level, now holding 216 rooms and 86 baths. The dining room could seat 350-400 comfortably.

The Beach Hotel was the tallest building ever constructed in Charlevoix.

Mrs. Baker bought fourteen large neighborhood residences called “cottages” to hold overflow and cater to families. A large white “annex,” middle left, went up on the bluff edge. At its height the Beach Hotel complex could house about 1,000 people per night. Mrs. Baker died in 1922, leaving everything to her daughter, a playgirl who lost it all by 1939. Kept going by several subsequent owners, the Beach burned to the ground in a spectacular all-night fire during demolition on October 17, 1967

Martha Elston Baker’s father Robert built this hotel in the mid 1890s, called The Elston Hotel. He realized the need for a large downtown hotel after the railroad arrived in 1892. In March of 1915 the Elston suffered a 3:00 a. m. fire that nearly destroyed the building. Rebuilt and increased from seventy-five to ninety-two rooms in three wings, it became the Michigan Hotel, then Hallett’s Inn, then the Hoover, finally the Lakeview Inn. The building was torn down in the early 1960s to make way for Oleson’s grocery store plaza.

The Bartlett Hotel was built on Park Avenue by a local doctor in 1908. Dr. L. D. Bartlett had owned a hotel on Bridge Street since 1898. He decided to start fresh here, near the Congregational Church, and opened in 1909. The Detroit Lions football team of 1942 stayed at the Bartlett when they came to town for a summer training session. They went on to have the worst year in their history until the debacle of 2008. The Bartlett was torn down over the winter of 1966-67. The Captain’s Watch condominiums stand in its place.

In 1927 Mr. A. Salem Mussallem, an Armenian with a Lebanese passport who always wore a fez, turned the top floor of the Lewis Grand Opera House into the Hotel Alhambra and the theater area into an oriental rug emporium. He added a red brick façade and loggias on the north and west sides for fire safety. The Alhambra suffered ups and downs in its later years and was barely inhabited at the end. Its street floor commercial spaces finished life as a bowling alley and an oriental bazaar full of cheap gewgaws. The Alhambra was razed in 1947 to make way for the construction of Memorial Bridge.

This hotel began as the Oldham Club, an exclusive dining club with eleven guest rooms built in the 1920s by Harry Oldham on the Park Avenue bluff a few yards from the water tower. The Coast Guard signal flag tower is to the building’s right. The Club discreetly catered to high rollers with a little unpublicized gambling on the side. Its balcony and porch provided a spectacular northwest view of Lake Michigan. In the 1930s, new owners changed the name to the Tower Hotel. Most of it came down in the 1970s, after which the rest was incorporated into the Sandcastle Condominiums in the early 1970s.

The Hotel Charlevoix began life as the Bridge Street House in 1881. Dr. L. D. Bartlett purchased it in 1898 when it became the Hotel Bartlett. After he moved to his new place on Park Avenue it became Baker’s Inn, then the Hotel Charlevoix. The building stretched from the sidewalk almost to Round Lake. To its right were Ed Goldstick’s shoe hospital, then Bill the Hatter and his shoe shine stand, in summertime business since 1902. Bill could shine your shoes with “Gay Dyes of All Colors.” The hotel burned to a crisp on June 7, 1935.

The fire sparked the construction of East Park. Even in mid-Depression a visionary group of professional and business men, who realized the potential of the view that opened up, was able to make sure the city obtained almost all the rest of the 300 block and razed it. The newly exposed land was then tranformed into what Charlevoix and untold thousands of visitors have for so long enjoyed, thanks to the burning of a hotel. East Park was given a total makeover, including a major expansion of the marina facilities, from 2007 to 2009.